In 1789, when he was just eighteen, Charles Brockden Brown published a poem in honor of Benjamin Franklin, only to find that an erring printer, “from zeal or ignorance, or perhaps from both, substituted the name of Washington.” The blunder, Brown relates in his journal, converted the Republic's military savior into a mere philosopher and “made the subject ridiculous. Every word of this clumsy panegyric was a direct slander upon Washington, and so it was regarded at the time.”

This early incident from Brown's career can be read as a parable of his difficulties in trying to become a self-supporting author – a Franklin of letters – in a society dominated by republican ideals. Multiple lines connect the nation's first “canonical” novelist to the self-made Philadelphia printer who delighted in novels and adopted a female persona in his earliest publication. Like Franklin's Autobiography, Brown's fictions declare themselves to be acts of writing and hence products of print culture in contrast to the oral modes that previously held sway in America. In Brown's hands, the native novel realizes its identity as a middle-class genre overtly concerned with social mobility and individual self-fulfillment. A recurrent motif in his work, as in Franklin's, is sympathy for women and for the liberal project of female rights. Determined to treat literature as an occupation, not a gentlemanly pastime, Brown struggled to achieve independence by his pen. He was defeated in this goal most obviously because of his society's inability to support a class of professional authors, an understandable deficiency in a predominantly agricultural people. But beyond this, Brown's ambitions as a novelist foundered because he was reconceptualizing his medium as a private rather than a civic form. And in 1800, the public-spirited and corporate orientation of American culture still outweighed its individualistic side: the spirit of Washington overshadowed that of Franklin.

Many commentators have noted a marked change of emphasis in Foucault's later thinking about issues of truth, ethics, and social responsibility. For some, this change was characterized chiefly by a certain relaxation of the skeptical rigor – the attitude of extreme Nietzschean suspicion with regard to truth-claims or ethical values of whatever kind – that had hitherto played a prominent role in his work. Thus, according to Roy Boyne, the shift can be located with a fair degree of precision as occurring between Volume One of The History of Sexuality (where Foucault's genealogies of power/knowledge seem to exclude all notions of truth, enlightenment, self-understanding or effective political agency) and the later, posthumous volumes where this doctrine gives way to a sense of renewed ethical and social engagement. In this work, as Boyne reads it,

This is not to deny that there remain great problems – especially from the standpoint of present-day cultural and gender politics – with Foucault's appeal to those techniques of self-fashioning that he finds best embodied in the ethos of Classical (Graeco-Roman) sexual mores. Although it offers an escape-route of sorts from his earlier outlook of cognitive and ethical skepticism, it still leaves certain crucial questions unanswered.

In certain passages of the story of America's exploration and colonization, literature has history coming and going. If, as we suggested earlier, literature in the sixteenth century often instigated history, sometimes the major legacy of the history was the literature it produced. The unsuccessful attempt to establish an English post on Roanoke Island left not even a significant ruin, but it did give rise to the first book about the New World written in English: Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1590). Harriot's book is an objective account of conditions in the New World; rather, it means to be objective. John Smith produced the first writings in a more subjective mode, which would become equally important in the literature. For Smith the New World was not only a site for imperial development but a theater of self-development as well. His major work, The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), also claims to be a “true report,” but along with accounts of natural resources and local hazards, it interweaves a narrative of Smith's career, often told in the third person. Finally, the most likely candidate for first American book written in English (Smith was not an American) is Roger Williams's 1643 A Key into the Language of America. These three works are the focus of this chapter.

Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was published in haste to support Walter Raleigh's petition to the queen not to abandon the Virginia colony, whose first settlement had just failed. A second edition was brought out by the Flemish engraver and publisher Theodor de Bry two years later as part of a projected series entitled America, and it was multilingual (Latin, German, French, and English). Harriot had collected notes for a much more extensive chronicle, but most of his papers were lost on the return voyage.

Like the drama eighteenth-century poetry was a public and didactic art. The practice of publishing verse in newspapers, common throughout the formative period, bespoke both the topicality of poetic discourse and, what was closely related, its embeddedness in the life of the nation. Poetry seldom dealt with private imaginings and personal emotions. Rather, it concerned itself with the kind of widely known information that was reported in the press: warfare, politics, the deaths of eminent individuals, and other public matters. Poetry had a social identity, and it shared in communal existence as a regular feature in newspapers and magazines, at college commencements and Fourth of July celebrations, and on city streets where it was hawked in broadside.

This accent on the community was strengthened by the poetic influences Americans absorbed from the English tradition. Early poets who enjoyed special popularity in the Republic included William Shakespeare and John Milton, both of whom were interpreted by Americans as writing on public themes, Shakespeare as a foe of tyranny, Milton as a friend of religious liberty and the author of the modern era's greatest epic. The Augustan, or neoclassical, style, at its height in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, held sway in the United States throughout the early years of independence. Emerging after the pietistic extremities and startling linguistic turns of the metaphysicals, neoclassicism moved away from intense and idiosyncratic expression toward “correctness” and regularity. The poetry of Alexander Pope, James Thomson, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift – the first in particular revered in America – addressed social and political issues with the goal of inculcating proper attitudes.

No American Writer was ever more conscious of founding a national tradition in letters than James Fenimore Cooper. As early as his second book, The Spy (1821), Cooper realized that in constituting himself the novelist equivalent of the Founding Fathers, he was making his principal bid for immortality. Yet few of Cooper's contemporaries in that era of new beginnings felt as uncertain as he did about the act of origination. In part his problem was the relatively simple one of finding a form and a setting for his fiction. But this problem encoded the more vexing one of whether Cooper – to schematize for the moment – was to be a “republican” or a “liberal” novelist, an author whose goals were social and patriotic or one who pursued primarily aesthetic ends. Behind this question lay the related issue of professionalization. How would Cooper accommodate himself to the commercial processes transforming the identity of the writer?

This literary pioneer reconceptualized his genre. Much like Irving, he reversed the emphases of the civic-humanist paradigm that governed the writing of fiction for the first quarter century of the Republic's existence. To the preceding generation, fiction was “truth” or history; to Cooper, history was fiction. By reimagining the novel as a subjective art form that would appeal to postrepublican readers, not as a moral discourse in narrative, Cooper affiliated his writing with the new social order.

Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is undoubtedly the world's most frequently screened playwright. There are to date more than fifty film versions of Ibsen plays, and probably about twice as many television versions.

For obvious reasons, the earliest screened versions of Ibsen exist only in the medium of film; after 1950, however, when the first television broadcast of an Ibsen play took place, there was a distinct change of emphasis. Once the new medium had been introduced, the number of film productions dwindled quickly and television became the new partner to which the Ibsen play was wedded. In fact, most of the Ibsen films were produced during the 'international', silent, black-and-white era. With the arrival of the sound film around 1930 the number of film productions diminished.

Not surprisingly, the greatest number of screen versions concern A Doll's House and Ghosts, but many of the other social plays have also proved to be attractive to screen directors. As might be expected, little attention has been paid to the early plays and, as far as film is concerned, to the late ones.

Sending Farmer James to the frontier to escape the terrors of the forward march of American nationalism was an unlikely move; surprisingly, Crèvecoeur seems not to have recognized that the promise of western expansion was among the major inspirations for the Revolution. Jefferson openly regarded the territories beyond the founding states as prime development sites. The last narrative we will consider, and in many ways the definitive one, emerged from a survey he commanded of the land west of the Mississippi. The expedition to the Pacific coast that was led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ended the era of exploration. It did so both by crossing the continent to its far coast and by demonstrating once and for all that there was no Northwest Passage through North America to the Pacific. One motive of all the previous explorations had been to fulfill the errand of Columbus by finding such a passage. It became clear that there was none just when America itself, having become the ground of an independent nation, was confirmed as a final destination in its own right. Indeed, the United States, once established as both a separate nation and as “America,” was not only a final destination but a point of origin. With this development, Buffon's “ungenerous sky” and “empty land” metamorphosed conclusively into the endless horizon and vacant wilderness of manifest destiny.

In fascinating ways, the literature of the New England Puritans reveals – and at times conceals – the remarkable number of contradictions in their religious, social, and political ideas, and it demonstrates how they managed to balance opposing aspirations and ideals to sustain a society that was from the start fragmenting from internal conflicts. Despite their tenacious struggles to achieve clarity in their expressions of purpose and design, the Puritans were frequently ambiguous and paradoxical. This chapter attempts to account for the compulsions, dissensions, and convergences within their culture and to demonstrate the intellectual complexity of their thought and writing. Language and literary forms both generated and formulated narrative expressions of the experiences of individuals and their communities as the generations journeyed from the bleak landing at Cape Cod to the flourishing of the New England Federation in 1642 to the tragic events at Salem in 1692.

Over the past forty years, scholarship on the American Puritans has been so rich and various that there is hardly a statement one can make about the Puritans today without arousing controversy. Scholars in every area of the humanities and social sciences have employed new theories and methodologies in their studies of Puritan New England. Because many see the Puritans as having established certain ideas and structures that are fundamental to later American society – although even this point is much debated–scholars are attracted to the study of seventeenth-century New England, and interpretations of that culture frequently have larger political and ideological implications for the United States as a whole.

On the eve of leaving the known world to circle the globe in quest of an empire, Christopher Columbus decided to write a book. His decision foretold an important link between writing and colonizing, a link that entailed a redefinition of writing and of its relation to both the writer and history. That redefinition is the subject of this first, introductory chapter. In appropriating the New World, Europeans expropriated millions of prior inhabitants, and Chapter 2 interrogates the difficulties involved in recovering the historical substance of that expropriation today. The remaining five chapters seek to understand how the writing of books entered into the process of the conquest. Each chapter reads selected works very closely for what they reveal of the terms in which Europeans took possession of the New World, how they declared it new and yet timelessly theirs.

The emphasis throughout on the role of books and writing in the making of America does not imply a view that reality is the product of its telling. The literature of American colonization is a particular case characterized by its writers' conviction that writing could wield material power in shaping history. Only some thirty years separate the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible from Columbus's departure for the Canary Islands. In the late sixteenth century, the activities of writing and of publishing began to assume unprecedented social and political importance, and an assumption of new powers is evident in all the texts treated here. John Smith's tracts and histories intend to alter policies that the captain finds confoundingly resistant to more direct intervention.

Chapter 9 of William Bradford's (1590–1657) Of Plymouth Plantation (written, 1630–46; published, 1857) contains perhaps the most frequently cited passage in colonial American writing. The chapter is entitled “Of Their Voyage, and How They Passed the Sea; and of Their Safe Arrival at Cape Cod.” After describing the arduous Atlantic crossing that brought the Pilgrims to the New World, Bradford signals a touchstone moment: “But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same.” A long descent of readers has stood amazed at a vision of the Plymouth landing that long ago moved from history into myth. Bradford's immediate readers did not have to look far back; for them it was barely yet history. Indeed, Bradford made it history by establishing in it the parameters of an American legend.

Bradford began writing his history in 1630. The passage at hand comes early in the narrative, which at this point still draws heavily on a journal until recently attributed to Bradford himself and Edward Winslow (1595 – 1655) – author of Good News from New England (1624) – that had been published in London in 1622. (The current view is that the author remains uncertain.) A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England (generally referred to as Mourt's Relation, perhaps for George Morton, who saw it through the press) covers the events of the colony's first year, from September 1620 to March 1621, in a mostly matter-of-fact tone and with a good deal of concrete detail.

By 1700, European empires had fully annexed the American continents; by midcentury, a debate over the value of the new acquisition divided the literature of exploration. In that debate, one side offered a “degenerationist” argument to the effect that nature in the New World wilderness had fallen from its proper level, which could only be maintained by cultivation. The other side countered that American nature had been remarkably fertile from pre-Columbian days and that cultivation was only bringing out, not creating, its inherent fertility. Both sides concurred on the necessity of colonizing the New World, of course. But the degenerationists understood colonizing as opening new territories for annexation to the existing European world; the defenders of American nature saw the newly annexed continents as constituting their own world, which might even surpass Europe. The degenerationists were largely Europeans; most of the defenders, already Americans.

The lines drawn in “the dispute of the New World, ” as this controversy is commonly known, extend to map the world of eighteenth-century political and scientific thought as a whole. In the arguments over the worth of New World flora and fauna, it is possible to trace the emergence not only of ideas of America but reciprocally of revised images of Europe as well. Reciprocity is the key term here. It was the central dynamic in a dispute that enacted the culminating moment of the discovery, when the New World fully entered into the worldview of the Old. The early colonial expeditions can be understood incrementally. There was more to the world than had been known; but because the additional portions were accruing to Europe, the enlarged world retained its prior order. Geopolitically at least, the center still held. But the extraordinary vigor of the eighteenth-century dispute concerning the agricultural potential and general desirability of the New World indicates that seismic forces were at play.

Religious voices speak first in the Revolution. At one level, this primacy merely restates the dominance of religious expression in early American culture. Until 1765, religious publications in the colonies outnumber all other intellectual writings combined, and they remain the single largest category of publication throughout the revolutionary era. But initial dominance only begins to explain the importance of religious expression in Anglo–American political debate. The relation between dissenting religious traditions and the growth of oppositional political discourse is a barometer of cultural modification and literary creativity throughout the era.

Steeped in the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, radical Protestants in eighteenth-century America know how to oppose a king. Jonathan Mayhew's approval of “the Resistance made to King Charles I” in A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (1750) is shocking to his contemporaries not because it “takes the side of Liberty, the BIBLE, and Common Sense, in opposition to Tyranny, PRIESTCRAFT, and Nonsense” – standard dichotomies in eighteenth-century Protestant thought – but because, in rejecting ‘the slavish doctrine of passive obedience and nonresistance,’ it also advocates the right to judge and then act against a king as part of “the natural and legal rights of the people against the unnatural and illegal encroachments of arbitrary power.’

Similar language could be heard in England, but it dominates debate in America in a different way altogether. Mayhew, after all, first preaches Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission before his own congregation in the prestigious West Church of Boston. He and other American clergymen can take greater risks than their English counterparts when accused of “preaching politics instead of CHRIST” because they face a large and uniquely sympathetic audience for radical Protestant polemics.

Beginning in the 1650s, the growing number of merchants in Boston, Salem, Cambridge, New-town, and other large towns along the seaboard began to discover themselves to be a special class. Unlike farmers, who were threatened by new immigrants seeking land, the merchants favored the growth and development of new products and international trade. During the Half-Way Covenant controversy of the 1660s, powerful merchants such as John Hull embraced those Pauline aspects of Puritan doctrines that had originally favored expansion of the fellowship, and they sided with those who supported more liberal membership standards. As disputes raged within First Church, Boston, in the 1660s, a coalition made up mainly of merchants split off to found Third Church, later known as the Old South. Under the leadership of Thomas Thatcher until 1678 and of Samuel Willard from then until his death in 1707, the Old South maintained quite lenient membership requirements.

One critical text confronting the issue of church membership was Giles Firmin's The Real Christian (1670). A prolific contributor to the parliamentary debates under Cromwell, Firmin lived in New England in the 1630s and 1640s and then returned to England during the Protectorate. Firmin had criticized his former New England colleagues Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard for being too rigid in their schematic accounts of preparation and for their discouragingly high standards for proving conversion. Firmin tried to persuade his English colleagues to advocate more tolerance, to understand “self-love” as natural, and to recognize God to be merciful and reasonable. His work found wide circulation in Boston in the 1670s, and its republication in Boston in 1742 demonstrates that the debates over conversion and church membership still continued seventy years later.

Washington Irving has as good a claim as anyone to the title “Father of American Literature.” Born in 1783, the year the United States won its freedom, and named for the military hero venerated as the Father of His Country, Irving was the first American to make a successful vocation of authorship. Although contemporaries both at home and abroad recognized his seminal importance as the man who declared the nation's literary independence, later readers have dealt less kindly with Irving. Most have ignored his claims to precedence and dismissed him as inherently less interesting and “modern” than either James Fenimore Cooper, who followed him historically, or Charles Brockden Brown, who never attracted a popular readership. “Father of American Literature,” in this sense, implies that Irving belonged to an outdated phase of culture – archaic and pre-Romantic, too remote to engage twentieth-century sensibilities.

Much in Irving's career and work lends support to this view. He portrayed himself as an antiquated gentleman and idler who felt out of place in the bustling present and had no interest in the commercial side of letters. Avoiding the novel, the genre of a modernizing civilization, he worked in forms – the essay serial, the sketch, the history – that now seem old-fashioned or somehow inappropriate for a creative artist. His writing remained imprinted with the “residual” features of eighteenth-century culture: anonymity, collaboration, regard for factuality coupled with uneasiness about originality, and an understanding of literature as communal possession.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, during the period when the English colonies declared themselves a nation, the enterprise of coming to the New World and exploring it changed decisively. From a perilous journey into the unknown, it became the civilized pursuit of traveling in America. In 1796, Timothy Dwight (1764–1846), finding the life of a president of Yale College too sedentary, decided “to devote [his] vacations … to a regular course of traveling”. During the second of these salubrious journeys, it occurred to him while surveying the orderly countryside to wonder how these New England landscapes had appeared eighty or even a hundred years earlier. But he found the past impossible to recall, so swift had been the transformation. He resolved instead to capture the fleeting present and record it for those who would live eighty or a hundred years hence. “A country changing as rapidly as New England must, if truly exhibited, be described in a manner resembling that in which a painter would depict a cloud”, he wrote. It was an accurate rendition of a period of transition. Dwight traveled for his health and wrote about his travels as a literary pursuit – reflectively, speculatively, poetically, and for an undoubted posterity.

The grandson of Jonathan Edwards and himself a prominent minister, Dwight represents an already old New England. He recalls the persistence of Puritan values at the founding of the Republic. Commending the decent “competence” and measured way of life of his Connecticut neighbors, he disdains the excitements of the traditional travel narrative.

In 1826, at the opening ceremonies of New York's Bowery Theater, a speaker voiced the hope that “the latent talents of some native Bard may here be warmed into existence, who shall emulate the growing fame, acquired in other walks, by Irving and Cooper.” The statement reveals a conspicuous truth about the early American drama. As Western culture entered its Romantic phase, the American theater could not boast a single figure of international stature, a playwright who could stand comparison with the new Republic's leading fiction writers. The nearest America came to a world-famous dramatist in 1826 was John Howard Payne, a transplanted New Yorker whose adaptations of French hits played to full houses at London's Drury Lane; today, Payne is little more than a footnote to literary history.

The American drama was the most republican and propagandistic of the literary genres. Slow to accommodate the individualism that became synonymous with nineteenth-century authorship, it failed to develop Romantic talents of the highest rank. One might object that the nineteenth century, the age of the novel's apotheosis, proved remarkably inhospitable to Western playwriting generally. Although this may be an accurate appraisal, at least until the last quarter of the century, it remains true that the complex of assumptions governing the native stage was singularly uncongenial to the nurturing of Romantic inwardness and self-realization. The drama of the early Republic was intimately tied to the civic sphere. It retained a commitment to the common good long after fiction and poetry (or rather, the fictions and poems considered canonical) had modified or shed such loyalties for more private goals.

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality) that these reorganizations of knowledge also constituted new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often generated contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory bio-power have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault's historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault's account of the intertwined emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second part will initiate my reflections upon the concepts of “power” and “knowledge” with a critical discussion of political and epistemic sovereignty.

The title of this chapter might seem paradoxical, even a contradiction in terms. The forbidding seriousness of Ibsen's later works has become a legend, especially to those who know them mainly by repute. Yet the earliest of his plays to deal with contemporary social realities were all classed as comedies; to understand how he developed as an artist - and as a social critic - it is essential to know something about the ways in which he approached and adapted the conventional comedy of his day.

It is as well to remember at the outset that the term 'comedy', even leaving aside its more specialized modern uses and more general older meanings, is an equivocal one. It has been used to denote a tone of voice or mode of perception (something 'light' or 'amusing'); it can indicate a special kind of dramatic plot, a 'happy end' with the blend of assurance and strain which that can imply; and it can suggest a specific subject-matter - in Jonson's words 'an image of the times' which deals 'with human follies not with crimes'. In much classic comedy - in Shakespeare or Molière or Holberg - all three of these senses may apply. But there is no logical reason why, in all circumstances, they should. The appalling may also be funny, without suggesting redemption or a happy end; human follies can also be crimes. One could read Ibsen's entire œuvre as a deconstruction of the various, always potentially divergent, elements of what is classed as comedy.